Angie Estes

Lieu de Coiffure Mémoire

Fireproof pious rumor, precious fume
of composure with your furious romp
and rump furioso, you can arrange
everything except the letter
D, disappeared, from the shop sign
in Paris: Coiffure pour ames.
Apparently, even the souls of
the dead feel better with a new
hairstyle, so in the fourteenth-century
vellum illumination of Dante’s Wood
of the Suicides, the harpies show up
in red stockings, blue wings, and perfect
hairdos like that of Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame
du Haut, set to outlast the winds
of Ronchamp. Although pouf and pumice
smooth the furor, memory’s slow-burning
fuse still arrives at the Do or Dye
Salon. Samuel Sewall, the only judge
in the Salem witchcraft trials to ever
publicly admit his mistake, wrote
in his diary that “God has ordained
our hair as a test to see whether
we will submit to his will or insist
on our own.” In her 50s
my mother began to wear
wigs. Now look what the cat
dragged in when he found them perched
on their styrofoam stumps, wings
flipped up to the sky.